Requesting help flipping over a plane on Duna

[Ultimate Steve]

Recently, in my (mostly) no revert career, I managed to flip over my Duna plane during a botched landing. The plane itself, while it is an abysmal design that is nearly impossible to land, is the only long range exploration craft on the entire planet and it is in perfect condition (although I will make some KIS tweaks) except for the fact that I can't use it because it is upside-down. Due to the fact that I have so much going on in this save, and that I switch between projects, of which this save is one, pretty often, game time actually runs a bit slower than real life time (6 years in game, which is less than 2 Earth years and I started this save in 1.3.1). This means that I don't want to launch a replacement craft or parts for a crane, as they would likely not arrive until 2021, long after this crew has left Duna. Basically, I would like to flip it back over and I need your help because I've tried to think of a way and I didn't get further than "ram it with the rover and hope it works."

I have many mods installed, but the only useful mods for flipping that I can think of are KIS/KAS. However, there are no winches on the whole planet. Kinda an oversight. I'm probably going to put together a KIS "emergency supply pod" to take on all manned interplanetary missions from now on, to think of it. We do have an ample amount of KIS ports, which we can make non-flexible pipes between.

However, there are some spare parts I can use to build some sort of machine. Here is what we have to work with:

First of all, the Duna plane, shown above. I really don't want to remove the wings as it would be a pain trying to get them back on perfectly, but doing that to one side and then rolling the craft over would be the easy way. Other than that, I can probably remove everything within reason.

The Duna rover. I don't want to take this part more than superficially as this is my only means of transport now, but if we have to (reversibly) take it apart I'm open to the idea.

Ascent vehicle one. This is also on its side, but it is easily flipped due to the service bay, although it won't stay up because of the missing landing leg. Not much that I'm willing to remove here either, as this is mission critical, but I'll include it for good measure. I can probably remove the landing legs, we shouldn't need them any more.

Duna base, which is actually just an old spaceplane (which we crashed on Duna). All of this can be taken apart and used as long as we are left with something usable as a base at the end.

Two starship-esque vehicles, one crewed ascent vehicle and one ISRU vehicle. I would prefer to not touch these as they are very important, but I can if I need to.

Underbelly of the crew ship. The solid abort motors are out of fuel.

Duna descent vehicle. I have two of these and I have zero purpose for them any more. IDK what will be useful, but they are there.

Duna base 2. As with the previous base, everything can be taken off as long as we are left with a functioning base.

Additional KIS inventory.

Duna Orbital Shipyard/Station. Again, would prefer not to touch the Starships, but the nearly useless station is fair game and if we need to, we can touch the starships. The one on the right is redundant now that the crew one has safely landed. Getting stuff down from up here would be challenging, but I was going to try to make flights up here with the ISRU ship to refuel things. In order to take anything down, I would have to do those flights with the crew ship instead (KAS drills) or modify the ISRU ship to carry crew. Both are very high risk operations and I would prefer not to do them but I can if necessary.

Transfer ship 02 "Vision." I had no plans to visit this before return, but as far as parts go, it may be more promising than the other station. They are in similar orbits, so I can get to both in a single flight. As long as I have a functioning return vehicle afterward, we can remove anything.

There are also some amount of minor debris around the base area, but nothing that noteworthy. There are other assets on Duna, but they are too far away to be practically reached by the rover, and I likely won't do suborbital hops with the Starships just to grab a part, as that means two high risk landings.

 

So, any ideas on how to flip the plane right side up with only the resources in the Duna system? I'll probably just end up taking the plane apart to a point where I can spin it, but if anyone else has any other ideas, they would be greatly appreciated.

Also, due to the (almost) no-reverts nature of this career, whatever I do needs to be as low risk as possible. I'm not going to put an ascent vehicle up to a substantial amount of risk to save an exploration plane.

 

 

 

[Goaty1208]

If you have breaking ground build a hinge rover and flip it over... i guess

[Regor]

7 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

Recently, in my (mostly) no revert career, I managed to flip over my Duna plane during a botched landing. The plane itself, while it is an abysmal design that is nearly impossible to land, is the only long range exploration craft on the entire planet and it is in perfect condition (although I will make some KIS tweaks) except for the fact that I can't use it because it is upside-down. Due to the fact that I have so much going on in this save, and that I switch between projects, of which this save is one, pretty often, game time actually runs a bit slower than real life time (6 years in game, which is less than 2 Earth years and I started this save in 1.3.1). This means that I don't want to launch a replacement craft or parts for a crane, as they would likely not arrive until 2021, long after this crew has left Duna. Basically, I would like to flip it back over and I need your help because I've tried to think of a way and I didn't get further than "ram it with the rover and hope it works."

I have many mods installed, but the only useful mods for flipping that I can think of are KIS/KAS. However, there are no winches on the whole planet. Kinda an oversight. I'm probably going to put together a KIS "emergency supply pod" to take on all manned interplanetary missions from now on, to think of it. We do have an ample amount of KIS ports, which we can make non-flexible pipes between.

However, there are some spare parts I can use to build some sort of machine. Here is what we have to work with:

First of all, the Duna plane, shown above. I really don't want to remove the wings as it would be a pain trying to get them back on perfectly, but doing that to one side and then rolling the craft over would be the easy way. Other than that, I can probably remove everything within reason.

The Duna rover. I don't want to take this part more than superficially as this is my only means of transport now, but if we have to (reversibly) take it apart I'm open to the idea.

Ascent vehicle one. This is also on its side, but it is easily flipped due to the service bay, although it won't stay up because of the missing landing leg. Not much that I'm willing to remove here either, as this is mission critical, but I'll include it for good measure. I can probably remove the landing legs, we shouldn't need them any more.

Duna base, which is actually just an old spaceplane (which we crashed on Duna). All of this can be taken apart and used as long as we are left with something usable as a base at the end.

Two starship-esque vehicles, one crewed ascent vehicle and one ISRU vehicle. I would prefer to not touch these as they are very important, but I can if I need to.

Underbelly of the crew ship. The solid abort motors are out of fuel.

Duna descent vehicle. I have two of these and I have zero purpose for them any more. IDK what will be useful, but they are there.

Duna base 2. As with the previous base, everything can be taken off as long as we are left with a functioning base.

Additional KIS inventory.

Duna Orbital Shipyard/Station. Again, would prefer not to touch the Starships, but the nearly useless station is fair game and if we need to, we can touch the starships. The one on the right is redundant now that the crew one has safely landed. Getting stuff down from up here would be challenging, but I was going to try to make flights up here with the ISRU ship to refuel things. In order to take anything down, I would have to do those flights with the crew ship instead (KAS drills) or modify the ISRU ship to carry crew. Both are very high risk operations and I would prefer not to do them but I can if necessary.

Transfer ship 02 "Vision." I had no plans to visit this before return, but as far as parts go, it may be more promising than the other station. They are in similar orbits, so I can get to both in a single flight. As long as I have a functioning return vehicle afterward, we can remove anything.

There are also some amount of minor debris around the base area, but nothing that noteworthy. There are other assets on Duna, but they are too far away to be practically reached by the rover, and I likely won't do suborbital hops with the Starships just to grab a part, as that means two high risk landings.

 

So, any ideas on how to flip the plane right side up with only the resources in the Duna system? I'll probably just end up taking the plane apart to a point where I can spin it, but if anyone else has any other ideas, they would be greatly appreciated.

Also, due to the (almost) no-reverts nature of this career, whatever I do needs to be as low risk as possible. I'm not going to put an ascent vehicle up to a substantial amount of risk to save an exploration plane.

 

 

 

Not relevant to the answer, but is that an awesome save!

[jimmymcgoochie]

Here’s an idea that might work:

- Try to rotate the plane to point directly downhill.

- Put something immovable directly in front of the plane so it can’t slide downhill. One of those descent modules would do if it’s nearby, as you don’t need it any more and it may get damaged.

- Drive the rover behind the plane and position one of the cockpits under a wing.

- Set the plane to hold radial in so it tries to stand on its nose. 

- Move all fuel to the front of the plane if possible to reduce inertia at the rear and make it easier to move the rear part of the plane.

- Maximum nose-up on the rover to give the plane a shove towards vertical. Setting the front wheel spring strength to minimal before doing this and then maximum when you pitch up might give a little bit more oomph.

- The combined efforts *might* be enough to get the plane to stand on its nose. The nose can’t move because it’s blocked by something else, so instead of sliding downhill it rotates and hopefully lands on its wheels; switching off radial in hold may be necessary to make it fall in the right direction.
 

Alternatively, rotate the plane to point uphill, retract air brakes, stand it on its tail (radial out hold plus RCS if possible or a rover assist if not), redeploy air brakes and fire the engines to get a little bit of altitude to roll the right way round before landing again.

 

Or if you just want the quick fix, hack gravity to 1% and rotate it that way.

[bewing]

Seems to me that you need the effect of "opening a cargo bay" underneath one of the wings. And it looks like your old spaceplane duna base has cargo bay sections that you can and are willing to cannibalize. One cargo bay section (plus a probe core  or command pod w/kerbal) should be enough, I'd think.

[Snark]

10 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

Basically, I would like to flip it back over and I need your help

So, a few thoughts.

First, reaction wheels.  Looks like you've got some to spare.  For example, your "Duna base 2" looks like it's got a reaction wheel sitting on top that it doesn't need anymore (since it's already landed)-- scrounge that.  Your "Duna base" crashed spaceplane has at least three more of those reaction wheels.

Grab as many spare reaction wheels as you can, and bolt them to the plane any-old-place (doesn't matter where).  They might have enough torque to flip it.

I see that you've got a ton or thereabouts of liquid fuel on the flipped plane, so if you could pump that out of there to somewhere, it could help make it easier to flip.  (Or, at least, pump it to somewhere on the plane that's as close as possible to the "flip point".)

The hardest part of flipping the plane will be getting it cranked off the ground in the first place.  So, if you can't quite manage it with all the reaction wheels, but you can come close to it, you could take one of these landing legs off your "Duna base 2" (looks like it's on sloping ground, so take off the uphill leg, it'll probably be fine):

...you can mount it somewhere strategic on the plane, then choose "extend landing leg" to make it lever the plane up off the ground and at least get it so it's standing up at a 45 degree angle or so.  If you can do that, then reaction wheels could take it the rest of the way.

 

Another idea that occurs to me would be to use two of these legs in sequence:  have one lever the plane up a bit.  Then insert the second one (retracted) farther in, and open it to lift the plane further.  Then take off the first leg and move it further in to lever the plane even more, and so forth.

 

But honestly, I suspect the simplest thing to do is:

1. attach as many reaction wheels as you can (you've got at least four that I can see)
2. try to flip with that
3. if it doesn't work, use a landing leg to prop the plane up off the ground and try again
4. also try removing the liquid fuel from the plane to save some weight

 

[EDIT] Now that I look a little more closely, looks like you've got at least 6 more reaction wheels in the underbelly of that crew ship.  So that's a total of at least 10 reaction wheels that you have available to play with.  Attach those to the plane and you oughta be able to flip it right over. 

[Ultimate Steve]

Thank you all for the responses! I ended up combining some of those ideas together.

First, I tried just using the three reaction wheels on the base to flip it. It didn't have much effect (but then later I realized that the batteries were dead... Oops) so I also used a medium plane landing gear mounted on the front of the rover to help flip it.

That didn't work either. I was about to give up and grab more reaction wheels from the other stuff (which is ~17km away, not a trivial easy distance but not too bad) when something strange happened. Phantom forces, likely from the landing gear, catapulted both craft into the air.

And with some quick thinking, I was able to land both of them upright, with the only damage being to one of the plane's solar panels!

From there, I took the reaction wheels off and completely redid the landing gear with KIS/KAS.

I also added like 5 more parachutes in case of an emergency landing. Previously there were enough to save the crew in the event of a midair breakup, but now if there are dangerous hills, the craft might survive landing intact. I'm not going to test that though. Those 5 parachutes were taken from the rover's descent system, which isn't needed any more. There were 6 of them, but one blew up while I was trying to grab it.

I've only had to land it twice so far I think, but it is a much better flying machine than it was previously. Thank you all for the help!